Ottawa schools grapple with the Exam Question: Are they a) outdated or b) essential?

While some educators stand by traditional exams as the best way to assess students, others say ‘summatives’ — projects, performances or interviews — foster more critical thinking and creativity. Andrew Duffy investigates.

High school teacher Jean Mantha founded the Macdonald-Cartier Academy because of his bedrock belief in the value of exams.

In 25 years as owner and headmaster of the private middle school in New Edinburgh, Mantha’s appreciation for exams as a teaching tool has only deepened. His school’s curriculum is built around seven exam sessions that define the school year.

Exams, he says, focus a student’s attention like no other task, and allow teachers to impart the organizational skills, time management and work habits needed to succeed.

“If students want to be successful in school,” Mantha argues, “somewhere in their educations they will have to learn how to prepare for exams.”

Mantha’s enthusiasm for exams puts him at one end of the spectrum in a debate now percolating in education circles across the country.

If the debate were framed as an exam question, it would be this:

A student concentrates on a test at Macdonald-Cartier Academy.Jean Levac /
Ottawa Citizen

Final exams are:

A) An outdated, stress-inducing method of assessing student knowledge

B) A proven tool essential for bringing focus to student learning

C) An anachronism in an era of iPhones, Google and instant information

D) Necessary preparation for student success in university or college

E) None of the above

Those educators who hold that exams are old, blunt instruments are turning to alternative forms of assessment — sometimes called summatives — that can include projects, interviews, lab experiments, artwork and performances.

Such summatives, they say, offer assessment tools that allow students to do more than sweat out memorized answers under the glare of gymnasium lights: They give them the ability to creatively deploy high-level skills such as critical thinking and analysis.

“We’re finding that there are other forms of assessment that do meet the rigour test and are sometimes more enriching,” says Pino Buffone, superintendent of curriculum for the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board.

The tug-of-war between exams and summatives is now playing out at high schools across the city as teachers decide how to best assess students whose first semester comes to an end late this month.

In Ontario, the move toward alternative forms of assessment gained speed in 2010 when a new provincial government policy document, Growing Success, was published. Among other things, it required teachers to assess students using methods that are “ongoing and varied in nature.”

In response, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board encouraged high school teachers to diversify their student assessments, and get away from a strict reliance on pen-and-paper exams.

The board also revised its own assessment policy. Currently, 70 per cent of any final mark must reflect course work completed throughout the term; the other 30 per cent of the final mark must be made up of at least two year-end assessments, one of which can be an exam.

According to board policy, a formal, written exam can account for a maximum of 20 per cent of a student’s overall mark.

Buffone says the board doesn’t want to do away with traditional exams, but instead expand the roster of assessment tools.

“It’s a way to personalize the learning experience for our students,” he says, “because some might be able to show their knowledge and skill through an interview with a teacher, as opposed to a written two-and-a-half hour exam.”

The case for exam alternatives

Principal France Thibault of Glebe Collegiate Institute in Ottawa has developed a city-wide reputation for the use of exam alternatives.Jean Levac /
Ottawa Citizen

Glebe Collegiate Institute has earned a city-wide reputation as a leader in the development and use of alternative testing methods.

Principal France Thibault says the school has embraced that effort as part of a drive to make the classroom experience more compelling. The school, she says, tries to inject critical thinking, problem solving, and student-based inquiry — an approach that capitalizes on students’ natural sense of wonder — into all of its classes.

“But if you are going to do that,” Thibault adds, “you need to align your assessments and evaluation techniques with that — and it’s difficult to see that a traditional paper and pen test would align with those directives, particularly with the notion of critical thinking.”

To develop summatives, she says, teachers identify the major ideas in a course then reverse engineer tasks that allow students to demonstrate both knowledge and analysis.

In teacher Rachel Collishaw’s Grade 10 Canadian history course, for example, students last year faced two summative tasks designed to make them apply critical thinking to what they’ve learned. Both summatives were built around what Collishaw called her “course questions:” Is Canada a country that you can be proud of? How is Canada’s story, my story? Is Canada a better place now than before?

For their first summative, students selected one of those questions then developed a thesis by referring to people and events from 20th century Canadian history. They could present their ideas in the form of a conference exhibit, website, movie, slideshow, essay or an interview with a historical figure.

For their second summative, students were interviewed by Collishaw on one of the same course questions. In that interview, they had to describe the “skills of history” and how they learned them.

In some departments, such as science, pen and paper exams have largely been eliminated. In most science courses at Glebe, students face two summative tasks: an experiment that must be performed and analyzed, and an interview to discuss some of the course’s big ideas.

The new testing methods, Thibault says, reflect the fact that students are idiosyncratic: They don’t learn the same way and they retain different kinds of information. Some excel at writing, others at oral communication. To that end, she believes, summatives are a fairer form of assessment since they do not rely upon a ‘one size fits all’ approach.

“This offers a differentiated way of evaluating their real level of understanding and knowledge, but maintains the same rigour,” Thibault says. “In fact, I would suggest there’s a great deal more rigour in this process.”

Thibault rejects the idea that students need to learn how to study for exams in order to be successful at college or university. “Deep” learning, she argues, is the key to academic achievement.

“Deeply understanding the material and articulating the material is fundamental to success in university,” she says. “You can practice taking tests, but if you don’t understand the material, your marks are going to reflect that.”

The case for exams

Headmaster Jean Mantha, a vocal proponent of exams, talks with students at the Macdonald-Cartier Academy.Jean Levac /
Ottawa Citizen

At the Macdonald-Cartier Academy, however, headmaster Jean Mantha makes no apologies for his embrace of old-school exams, which can account for more than half of a student’s mark at the small private school that teaches grades 7 and 8.

He calls the diminished importance of exams in the broader school system a “scary” development when so many high school seniors have no clue how to study.

“Most kids at the high school level cram,” he says. “Even most students at the university level cram. But what they don’t understand is that there are methods that exist that are a lot better than cramming.”

At Macdonald-Cartier, students write a set of seven exams in six academic subjects; all of the exams test students on knowledge accumulated from the beginning the school year.

To prepare for those exams, each of the academy’s 64 students is expected to take extensive notes in class — there are no teacher handouts — and complete 90 minutes of homework a night. That work, Mantha says, helps students identify what they don’t know in advance of an exam, and gives them time to correct the situation before they sit the test.

“Most high school students let the exam tell them what they don’t know,” Mantha says. “What we try to do is create a method to allow students to know what they don’t know before the exam.”

Some students are fearful of exams or suffer exam-day stress, but Mantha tells them there’s only one proven method of overcoming those nerves: preparation. “If you’re not ready, exams are stressful,” he says. “I can’t do it for you, but I can tell you how you can avoid being nervous for exams.”

After each exam session, Macdonald-Cartier students enjoy an activity day — cycling, skiing or rock-climbing — to blow off steam.

Mantha doesn’t accept the argument that exams are an out-dated assessment tool in an age when people carry vast stores of information on their smartphones. “The brain is like a muscle,” he argues, “if you don’t exercise it, it will get lazy on you. Everything is too easy for kids today; access to information is too easy … I try to make students understand that life is not easy. You will have responsibilities. You will have evaluations.”

New ways to assess students

High school students in Calgary write a final exam.Grant Black /
Calgary Herald

In the broader landscape of education, there’s little doubt that the do-or-die final exam is losing ground to alternative forms of assessment. Even universities are looking at new methods for judging students.

At McMaster University, for instance, medical school applicants must undergo a computer-based assessment of their personal characteristics. It’s part of an effort by the medical school to identify those students with the ethics, compassion and communications skills — not just the marks — to become good doctors.

What’s more, across North America, many university professors are employing more in-class tests, and relying less on traditional, heavily weighted finals exams.

At Harvard University, the school used to schedule a three-hour final exam for every arts and science course unless a professor specifically requested an exemption. In 2010, however, the school reversed that policy and required professors to notify administrators only when they wanted a seated exam.

A 2010 Harvard report found only 23 per cent of undergraduate courses and just three per cent of graduate courses at the Ivy League school had final exams.

At the high school level, the diminution of final exams raises a host of questions. Is the trend leading to further grade inflation? Do students with more exam experience do better at university? Are the new assessment methods as objective as exams?

The high school marks required to enter university have been going up for decades and that ascent began before alternative-testing methods came into vogue. A Maclean’s magazine study found that the average high school grade of students entering university in their home provinces hit 85 per cent in 2012, up from 83 per cent five years earlier.

The Alberta government has recently moved to water down the importance of its standardized exams because of concerns that the province’s students were being disadvantaged.

Last year, the Alberta government decided to reduce the weight of Grade 12 diploma exams written by students in language arts, social studies, math and science. The exams now account for 50 per cent of a student’s final mark, but beginning this September, their weight will be reduced to 30 per cent.

Research in the province showed that the diploma exams lowered the final marks of Alberta student by an average of 3.5 per cent. Proponents of the rebalancing said the exams were costing Albertans university placements and scholarships since students from most other provinces did not face such high-stakes finals.

(British Columbia and Quebec are the only other provinces that still require graduating high school students to write provincial exams.)

There’s limited evidence that students who face provincial exams do better in university since the question has rarely been studied. In one study, University of Saskatchewan researchers followed incoming students for three successive years. Published in 2011, the study found the averages of exam-experienced Alberta students dropped 6.4 percentage points from Grade 12, while the marks of their counterparts from four other provinces fell by as much 19.6 percentage points.

University of Ottawa professor Dany Laveault, an expert in student evaluation, says any well-designed instrument — whether a summative task or final exam — can be used to assess complex skills and can be made objective with a well-defined scoring rubric against which answers are judged. He approves of the new assessment methods provided they’re used in concert with exams.

“To make sure that a student is assessed in a variety of means, it adds something to the education system,” he says.

But Laveault would also like to see more emphasis on the written word: “You need students to be able to write long dissertations, essays. That’s a skill that they will definitely need at university: to be capable of putting their thinking in writing.”

A brief history of exams in Ontario

In 1950s Ontario, university admission decision rested entirely on results from Grade 13 departmental exams. Teacher assessments gradually took on more importance, then in 1968, the Hall-Dennis Report ushered in an era of “child-centred learning.” Departmental exams were abolished.

The province’s Royal Commission on Learning (1994) brought wide-scale assessments back to the Ontario school system. Based on the commission’s recommendations, the province created a regime of standardized tests that concentrate on numeracy and literacy. Students are assessed in grades 3, 6, 9 and 10.

But the elementary school tests do not count for any part of a student’s grade, and the high school tests play little role. The Grade 10 literacy test, a graduation requirement, can be replaced by a high school literacy course.

Since 2003, Ontario’s overall graduation rate has gone up by 15 percentage points to 83 per cent.

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